LIONEL MESSI’S MOMENT

The World Cup 2022 final has offered a new peak in the football star’s legendary career.

It’s fair to say that 2022 will be a year forever associated with Lionel Messi’s name, thanks to his World Cup glory in Qatar. After 28 days, 64 games and 172 goals at Qatar 2022, Messi walked up on the podium at Lusail Stadium to finally get his hands on the World Cup trophy that had eluded him throughout his career. The thirty-five-year-old provided seven goals and three assists, and broke multiple records, as Argentina conquered the sport for the first time in 36 years. It was, for many, the perfect ending to a World Cup that has been viewed by over a billion people around the globe.

Messi, arguably the best soccer player in the world, won thirty-five major titles for Barcelona, the club for which he played most of his professional career, before joining Paris Saint-Germain last year, and won the Ballon d’Or, the international award given to the best soccer player of the year, more times than any other player. But he had never won a World Cup for Argentina; so at the age of thirty-five, and with his fifth, and likely his last, chance to do so, it almost seemed like a destined target. In the past, many Argentines accused Messi of not trying hard enough because he didn’t care enough about his country of birth. An NPR/Futuro Media podcast, “The Last Cup,” from the Argentine American journalist Jasmine Garsd, counterargued that winning for Argentina had been Messi’s dream since he left for Europe, in 2001; that Messi, like so many migrants, want to return home as the prodigal son.

The child of working-class parents from Rosario, the third largest city in Argentina, Messi became a soccer sensation at a very early age. Salvador Ricardo Aparicio, the neighborhoodclub coach, remembered the now-mythic moment, during a game on a dirt field in Rosario, when a ball landed at the feet of a four-year-old Messi. Tiny and shy, he didn’t know what to do with it, so he let it pass. When a second ball came his way, he looked at it and suddenly started running, pushing it forward at full speed, passing every opponent.

Messi was thirteen when a scout from Barça—F.C. Barcelona—offered to bring him to Spain. It was decided that Messi’s father would go with him, while his mother and his three siblings stayed in Rosario.

He was a rising star in Spain but still unknown in his home country when, three years later, the coach of the Argentina under-seventeen national squad, Hugo Tocalli, invited him to play in a friendly match against Paraguay. Messi startled home fans by scoring a spectacular goal. It was an exhilarating moment: Argentina had found the next Diego Maradona, whom many consider to be the best soccer player ever.

But the shrewd, charismatic, larger-than-life Maradona, who died in 2020,carried entire teams on his shoulders, and secured victory after victory, both abroad (he brought Napoli from obscurity to the top of the European clubs in the nineteen-eighties) and at home. Maradona won the World Cup for Argentina in 1986, with two now legendary goals: the controversial Hand of God goal and the Goal of the Century. Messi delivered victories for Barcelona.

He played for Argentina in the Copa América in 2007,2011,2015,2016,2019, and 2021, and in the World Cup in 2006,2010,2014,2018 ,2018, and 2020 and the team lost all but one of those contests.

It wasn’t just the losses that Argentines lamented; it was Messi’s perceived attitude. “He played like he played in Spain. When he lost the ball, he acted like it wasn’t a big deal,” Gerardo Salorio, who was Messi’s trainer in Argentina’s under-twenty squad, told Garsd. “I told him, ‘Here, if you don’t run, they are gonna kill you. Here, we play with a knife under a poncho. If you don’t run and score, people here will spit on you.’ ” Comments were vicious: Messi had no devotion, no courage, no feelings, no patriotism.

The rest of the world saw him as a supernatural athlete, but local commentators and fans dismissed him as “no longer Argentine” and “a failure.” The crowds in the stands chanted “Diego, Diego” to tell him who he was not. “Maradona is our immortal hero, who not only gave Argentina a World Cup but did it by beating England” in 1986, Ezequiel Fernández Moores, a highly respected Argentine sports journalist, told me—a symbolic victory four years after Argentina had lost the Malvinas War, also known as the Falklands War, to the British. “Maradona is much more than a soccer player,” he said. “Messi wants to be just a soccer player.” But that’s not enough for a country where soccer is so deeply embedded in the national identity.

For a century, Argentina has been in thrall to the idea of a lost grandeur, a crucial moment in time when it was to become one of the most important nations in the world, but was somehow missed, crippled by politics or circumstance.

Since then, the country has looked for its alleged superiority in the individual successes of scientists, writers, and sport figures. Friends in Argentina constantly ask me, “What are they saying about us in New York?,” as if everyone in the world were paying attention to the national drama. And every four years, at the World Cup, when the world actually is paying attention, it’s Argentina’s value as a nation that’s at stake. Messi’s “attitude” seemed to imply he didn’t care about that value as much. He had, after all, left the country. And Argentina, long the host to millions of migrants from around the world, has a complicated relationship with those who leave to make it elsewhere, either as political exiles or as escapees from economic straits.

In 2016, after Messi failed to score a penalty kick in the final match of the Copa América, against Chile, he finally quit. “I am done with this team. Like I said before, it’s been four finals. Unfortunately, I searched for it, it was what I wanted the most, and it was not given to me, but now it’s over,” he said. But, despite the years of opprobrium, his resignation shocked the country.

Crying kids posted videos on social media begging him to stay. Commentators apologised for having been too harsh. “In soccer, you always get your revenge,” a boy said, addressing Messi in a video that went viral. “And, I promise, you will get yours. You will win the next cup. All I ask is that you come back to Argentina.”

Messi did, and, on July 2021 Argentina won the Copa América, beating Brazil 0–1. It was a stunning win, not only because Argentina hadn’t won the title in twenty-eight years but because the game took place in the Maracanã Stadium, in Rio de Janeiro, the sacred temple of Brazilian soccer, where the national team had only ever lost a competitive match once, against Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup.

Messi didn’t score the goal, but he was the captain of the team, and, when the game ended, the cameras immediately focussed on Messi as he collapsed on the ground, and the Argentine players, one by one, hugged him as if saying, ‘We did it for you, Leo.’ And Messi couldn’t stop sobbing.

He had finally won while wearing the Argentina jersey, but, more important, the country had seen his pain. All the sorrow he had been carrying for not having been able to give Argentina its victory was in the open, for all to see. For those who needed an Argentine Messi, there they had him.

Now on their route to the World Cup trophy, Messi was the man to help Argentina take the lead in their 0-3 semi-final win over Croatia, firing home an emphatic penalty to break the deadlock. The game›s final goal saw Messi tormenting Josko Gvardiol before squaring for Julian Alvarez to tap in. It was merely the latest divine intervention from the legendary forward.

And in the final it did not take long for Messi to get on the scoresheet in the final against France from the penalty spot after a dubious spot-kick was awarded to Argentina early in the first half. And then he scored his second in extra-time to put his side 2-3 ahead. They were pegged back again at the last, but prevailed thanks to Emi Martinez’s penalty heroics.

Now that he’s successfully added soccer’s greatest prize to his honour roll it may seem like there is no frontier left to conquer for Messi as he readies himself to return to action, with his sights presumably set on the one major competition that he has played in and not won since he turned professional almost two decades ago: the Coupe de France.